COPILOT WEEKLY
Wed, October 21, 2026
6-minute read
3 QUICK WINS · 2 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW · 1 GUIDE
👋 Hello, Hello
This week is all about skills. A skill is a saved set of instructions Copilot follows every time, so you stop re-explaining how you like things done. Three quick wins: use a skill in Excel, use one in PowerPoint, and create your own. Then two things you didn't know, and a guide to keep.
IN 5 MINUTES, BE THE ONE IN THE OFFICE WHO KNOWS COPILOT:
Call a skill in Excel with one @.
Run a ready-made skill on any deck in PowerPoint.
Record a skill instead of writing it.
Back up a shared folder every night while you sleep.
Let Copilot interview you to find what to hand off.
Share a skill with your team, and the highlights of Microsoft's skills guide.
3 Quick wins, for anyone just starting
1. 📊 Use a skill in Excel
Excel ships with skills, which are ready-made instructions for jobs like on-brand formatting and chart design. You don't write anything. You just call them.
Open a workbook and click Copilot.
Select + in the prompt box, then Choose plugins & skills. Or just type @ and pick a skill from the list. For example "@chart-design”
To switch skills on or off: three dots in the Copilot pane → Manage plugins & skills.
The catch: Which skills you see depends on your company's setup. Check your own menu.
One @, and Excel follows the recipe.
2. 🎞️ Run a skill in PowerPoint
PowerPoint comes with skills for the jobs everyone dreads before a presentation. Open any deck and try one.
Open your deck and the Copilot pane.
Select + in the prompt box, then Choose skills.
Pick one, or just use @ to tag the one you want to use.
Not sure what a skill does? Ask Copilot: "What does this skill do?"
Try this first: Run Prepare for questions on the deck you're presenting this week. You hear the hard questions before anyone asks them in the room.
Your deck gets a reviewer before it gets an audience.
3. ✍️ Do it once, Copilot repeats forever
Writing a skill means writing instructions, and most people never get around to it. So don't write it. Do the task once while Copilot watches, and it writes the skill for you.
Open the Copilot pane in PowerPoint: + → Choose skills → Manage plugins & skills → Custom skills → Add skill → Record Skill. Recording starts on its own.
Do the task the way you normally would: ask Copilot, edit the slides, or use the ribbon.
When the changes show on screen, select Stop. If Copilot is still working, wait for it to finish first.
Copilot drafts a name, a description and the instructions. Read them, fix anything off, then select Upload.
Use it anytime: type @ and pick it, or find it under + → Choose skills.
The catch: Recordings can be up to 10 minutes, voice isn't recorded, and anything you do after switching to another app or window isn't captured. Record one clear job at a time, and check the draft before you upload it.
Under the hood, a skill is just a text file called SKILL.md: a name, a line on when to use it, then your instructions. You can edit it, turn it off or delete it from the same Manage plugins & skills menu.
Explain it once. Never explain it again.
2 Things you didn't know you could do
Most teams have one OneDrive folder where everything important lives. Other people can get into it, but nobody has ever backed it up. Copilot Cowork can do that for you. Describe the job, approve it once, and it runs on its own.
Open Copilot → Cowork.
Paste prompt 1 below with your two folder names. Cowork looks in the backup folder first, so you know nothing is at risk of being overwritten.
Before each copy, Cowork shows you the file and where it's going. Select Approve.
In the same chat, paste prompt 2 to make it run every night.
To pause or change it later, go to My tasks → Scheduled.
Prompt 1, the backup: "Copy every file in my OneDrive folder [YOUR FOLDER] into [YOUR BACKUP FOLDER]. Leave the originals in [YOUR FOLDER] exactly where they are - this is a copy, not a move. Don't overwrite anything already in [YOUR BACKUP FOLDER], and tell me what you copied."
Prompt 2, the nightly schedule: "Now do this every night at 2am - copy any new files from [YOUR FOLDER] into [YOUR BACKUP FOLDER], skip the ones already there, leave the originals in place, and send me a short summary of what was copied."
Back up your skills too: your custom skills live in the Skills folder in your OneDrive. Point this backup at it, and a deleted skill is one copy away.
The day somebody saves over the good version, you just open the archive folder.
2. 🎤 Let Copilot interview you about what to hand off
Most of us don't know what to ask Copilot for. So flip it: have Copilot ask you. Tell it to interview you about your week, and it picks the one thing worth handing off and tells you how to build it. A good first skill might come out of this.
Open Copilot Chat.
Paste the prompt below, and answer one question at a time.
When it picks your one thing, ask it for the first step to build it.
The prompt: "I want to find one thing AI could take off my plate that would genuinely make my life easier. Not a productivity hack, something I'd actually feel. Interview me about my week: what I do, what I dread, what I keep putting off, what I'm the only one who remembers to do. Ask one question at a time. When you've got enough, tell me the one thing you'd pick. Describe in plain English what you'd build to handle it. Ask me any clarifying questions and wait for my feedback, then tell me the first step to building this out. Do not anchor yourself in 2019 ways of working. Consider appropriate tech assumptions moving into 2027 and work backward from there, and from what you know about me."
Prompt by AI with Allie. Watch it in Part 36 on TikTok.
Don't guess what to automate. Get interviewed.
1 Guide
Skills aren't only for Excel and PowerPoint. Copilot Cowork has a Customize page where all of them live, and Microsoft's guide to it is short and useful. Here's the juice.
THE GUIDE IN 6 POINTS:
One home for everything. In Cowork, select Customize in the left menu. It has three tabs: Preferences, Plugins and Skills.
Preferences are instructions for every task. Write down your tone, how you like documents formatted and your scheduling rules once, and Cowork applies them to everything. The limit is 20 KB, about 3,000 words. Type / to point at a skill, file, person or meeting. Keep it short: long or conflicting instructions leave less room for the task and can make answers worse.
The Skills tab has two lists. Your skills and Built-in. Select Add to have Cowork interview you and write the skill with you, or use the arrow next to it for Upload skill. Open any skill you made to edit it, download it, open it in OneDrive, share it or delete it.
Got a skill from a colleague? Upload it. Cowork takes a single .md file, or a .zip or .skill archive with a SKILL.md at the top. The file needs a name and a description. Limits: 1 MB for a .md file, 10 MB for an archive. If the name already exists, Cowork keeps both and adds a number.
Share it with your team. Open a skill you created and select Share. Pick Only you or specific people in your organization. When you improve it later, select Re-share and everyone's copy updates.
Plugins bundle skills and connectors. The Plugins tab shows what's installed and what's available to add. You can upload your own plugin as a .zip, and a Claude or other compatible plugin package is converted automatically.
Three tips from the guide: write the skill's description so it tells Cowork when to use it, not just what it does. Test a new skill in a new conversation before you rely on it. And turn off plugins you're not using, so results stay focused.
Before you upload one from the internet: a skill is a set of instructions your AI will follow. Microsoft says to only upload skills from sources you trust, so open the file and read it first.
Build it once, then share it with the whole team.
🎤 Ask us anything. Show us what you built.
A Copilot question you can't crack, a prompt that won't land, a feature you keep seeing but don't quite get: reply to this email.
Built something with Copilot? A workflow, a prompt stack, a skill file that saves you an hour a week? Reply and tell us. The whole point of this list is people sharing what they're shipping so everyone learns together.
Don't forget to rate today's post
That's your Copilot 3-2-1 for the week. Reply with the first skill you'd save.
Kushank and team
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